All posts by Anne Butterfield

Boulder, we have a friend in Xcel’s hometown of Minneapolis, MN.John Farrell of the Institute of Local Self Reliance has been educating communities for years on the economic benefits of self governance for essentials like energy, banking and waste management. Needless to say he took careful note when Minneapolis looked into municipalization, which did not pass just a few years ago. Today he says: “If I had the chance to go to the polls tomorrow and give Minneapolis the opportunity to take over, I would do it.” See his whole message for Boulder at the link below.

John Farrell has been teaching that “communities have to take control of their energy future, regardless of whether the federal government is a clean energy friend or foe.”

Clean Energy Action’s research has been near the heart of the City of Boulder’s understanding of why working with a coal-based investor-owned utility (IOU) can be so difficult for cities that are serious about clean energy and shutting down fossil-powered generation. We have been early but quiet supporters of local power – a municipal utility created for clean energy generation plus local innovation, more reliability and possibly lower rates.

For years CEA has accessed XcelEnergy’s dockets at the Public Utilities Commission and found the layers of power and law that protect the monopoly’s hold on the electricity market in most of Colorado. From those documents came the truth of the company’s generation plans with the fuel costs being passed straight to ratepayers while the profits go out of state, from the return-on-investment on capital spent on fossil-burning plants. Even as coal proved to have an untenable future with the industry’s many bankruptcies (never mind the climate impacts), Xcel overbuilt its coal burning fleet, and its whole system, for profits.

All of this was done in the face of increasingly visible climate change. All of this was done as the cost-competitiveness of wind power was proven in Xcel’s dockets. All of this was done amid state politics that were unlikely to pass legislation (such as Community Choice Aggregation, or Deregulation) to allow jurisdictions to contract independently for their electricity. Xcel customers have been trapped with Xcel’s foot dragging on clean energy and restrictions on distributed generation & storage, all to protect the “central-gen” model based on fossil-burning plants.

All of this is why CEA embraced the many advantages of municipalization – local municipal power that promises to be more affordable, reliable and responsive to ratepayers than IOU power ever can be. Boulder should continue this journey to find out the true costs of this venture!

Sign Here To Tell Colorado Decision Makers That Investing In Coal Now Is a NO-GO!

Xcel Energy plans to spend $400 million in upgrading two coal plants. As the US coal industry has taken an ominous nosedive, Colorado will face financial risk if these plants cannot be run. Renewables are cost-competitive with coal and natural gas and we know coal plants don’t balance well with renewables on the grid. In addition, coal plants need millions of gallons of water for cooling and climate change will not wait. It’s unconscionable.

For more background, see this searing review in the Denver Post by Leslie Glustrom, CEA’s co-founder:

Will coal investments become stranded assets?

A machine that no rational person wants to build is one that generates stranded assets — assets that become non-functional long before they have been paid for.

Unfortunately, customers of Colorado’s largest utility, Xcel, are bound to just such a “stranded asset machine,” given the poor decisions that the Public Utilities Commission is allowing Xcel to make.

Since the turn of this century, Xcel has spent about $1 billion on the Comanche 3 coal plant in Pueblo to serve the Denver-Boulder area, and now the Public Utilities Commission is turning a blind eye, yet again, while Xcel spends hundreds of millions of dollars on old Colorado coal plants in 2014 and 2015.

Under the current system, Xcel fully expects its customers to not only pay for these coal plant expenditures, but to also provide Xcel a return of between 7 percent and 8 percent on the money. In addition, Xcel will pass 100 percent of future coal costs through to customers under the Electric Commodity Adjustment mechanism.

This risk-free way of generating profit is good business as long as you can get the PUC to agree to it — which the PUC routinely does.

The financial world is abuzz with discussions of “unburnable carbon” and the need to avoid investments in fossil fuel assets that are likely to become stranded given the urgency of addressing the climate crisis.

None of this is being discussed as the Colorado PUC stands ready to approve hundreds of millions of dollars of expenditures on old Colorado coal plants as part of the ongoing Xcel rate case.

The PUC seems to have an unspoken rule that when you walk through the doors of the commission, all discussion and concerns about the planet and unburnable carbon will be left at the door.

In the 21st century, that is not only unconscionable, it is also leading Colorado into a very risky economic situation.

Even if there were no concerns about climate change, ocean acidification, boiling off Colorado’s precious water supplies to produce electricity, or the copious amounts of air, water and coal ash pollution created by coal plants, it still would be a bad idea to allow large investments in coal plants in the 21st century.

Finally, coal plants need a supply of coal to operate and the truth about coal is that most of the U.S. coal that can be mined at a profit is gone. The U.S. coal industry is running seriously in the red, stock prices have cratered, the largest companies are facing billions of dollars of debt and Wall Street has largely left the U.S. coal industry for dead. (For more depth, see here, and here, and here and here.)

Consequently, it is completely unclear who will be mining U.S. coal in the coming years and decades — what’s less for the five more decades that Xcel’s Comanche 3 coal plant is scheduled to operate.

Spending money on coal plants in light of these harsh realities is the height of economic (to say nothing of planetary) folly — but that is exactly what the Colorado PUC is letting Colorado’s largest utility do.

While the PUC is firmly keeping its eyes covered and its ears plugged to the realities of the 21st century, it is long past time that the state’s economic and political leaders took a hard look at the facts that the PUC is ignoring and put an end to Colorado’s stranded asset machine.